The history of the Sand Hill Indians living on the northern shores of Monmouth County, NJ can be traced back to the 1700s. Lenape Indian groups were present when the first European explorers visited the area in the 1600s. Cherokee Indian inhabitants migrated to the area during the 1700s. Since 1780, Sand Hill family names such as Reavy, Revy, Rebee, Revey, and Richardson are found on tax records, property transactions, deeds, census enumerations, birth indexes, and death and marriage certificates.
Cemetery records, probate records, will inventories from the Monmouth Hall of Records, military lists from Freehold, tin-type pictures, family photos, artifacts from the Neptune Historical Museum, records from the Monmouth County Library Archives in Manalapan, the New York Public Library Genealogical Research, the New Jersey State Library in Trenton, and New Jersey Historical Society in Newark, NJ, records from the late Jim Revey of the New Jersey Office of Indian Affairs, and oral histories told by generations of Sand Hill families supplement the story of the survival of Indian families in New Jersey.
Due to relentless land encroachment, Cherokee groups were gradually forced out of their homelands in Georgia. In the late 1700s, the Cherokee Richardsons migrated to New Jersey and New York to live with their Lenape cousins, the Reveys. Cherokee Indian Isaac Revey Richardson was born in Eatontown village in 1818 to Rebecca Revey and Joseph Richardson. In 1844, Isaac married a distant Lenape cousin, Elizabeth Susan Revey, born in 1826 to Susan Van Sneaden and Freemason Richard P. Revey in Manhattan. To save our Sand Hill heritage and counter misperceptions that all Indians moved westward and departed the area, the Sand Hill Indian Historical Association was created in 2002.
After living in Eatontown for over thirty years, Isaac and Elizabeth Richardson moved their eight children to the newly developing area of Asbury Park in 1877. The family became identified by the name Sand Hill from the local hill on their 15-acre property. Along with population growth at the shore area, Sand Hill families grew in number with each generation and prospered in Monmouth County, NJ.
